3rd Sunday of Advent
December 14, 2014
Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
“Comfort,
comfort my people! says your God. Speak
compassionately to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her compulsory service
has ended, that her penalty has been paid… A voice is crying out: ‘Clear the
Lord’s way in the desert!’”[1] What a beautiful opening from the prophet
Isaiah. “Comfort, comfort my
people! Speak compassionately to her,
and proclaim to her that her penalty has been paid.” What penalty?
Exile. Why? Because God’s people broke the covenant with
God. The people of Israel failed to
uphold their side of the covenant by putting other things before God, by not
fully trusting God, by turning a blind eye to injustice and oppression, and by
not taking care of those in need in their community. The consequence of their sin was exile to
Babylon. However, it was not exile for
exile’s sake, but a pruning, or stripping away.
Pruning is when you cut the plant back so that new and better growth can
appear. This was God stripping away
everything that was getting in the way of Israel’s relationship with God. What’s getting in your way of a right
relationship with God? What’s getting in
our church’s way? Israel was exiled and
suffered greatly because they messed up.
So have we. I think there have
been enough divisions and conflicts and unresolved arguments and harsh
criticisms that we have also suffered greatly and been pruned. And pruning hurts, it’s cutting something
that’s living. I think we have also been
in exile. Our Advent candle hymn says “O
come, o come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile
here.” We have been lonely, we have been
mourning, we have been held captive, and we are waiting to be ransomed. Well, today’s Scripture is that word: “Tell
my people they have suffered long enough and their sins are now forgiven.”[2] The penalty has been paid. Our season of pruning is over. It is time for new growth. A voice is crying out: ‘Clear the Lord’s way
in the desert!’” Or, in the old King
James, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!”
Prepare the Lord’s way, here in White Marsh [Middle River]! Here in this church, clear the way for the
Lord! It is time to move forward. Our sins are forgiven, the penalty has been
paid in every way except monetary, it is time clear the way. It is time to move on. How do we do that? By following advice you might give to a
teenager.
First,
you gotta clean up. It is time to move out the clutter, clean out
the closets, both the ones here at the church and the ones in your brain. Let bygones be bygones, or to quote the
latest wildly popular Disney movie, “Let it go!” It’s time to move on. Let’s clean out the remnants of projects that
didn’t work. Let’s let go of feelings of
resentment and grudges. Someone’s not
here anymore? Let’s move on without
them. No one is irreplaceable. Everyone has a role to play and someone else
can fill that role. The learning curve
may be steep, but someone else can do it.
There isn’t room for new growth if all the old junk is taking up all the
room. There isn’t room for joy and peace
if you’re holding on to bitterness and daily recounting the list of how you’ve
been offended. There isn’t room for
Jesus if we’re too full of complaining and things that drain life and reminders
of how life didn’t turn out how we had wished.
It’s time to clear out the clutter.
Keep the things that are good and life-giving and useful. Let go of all the other junk. There’s no space for new things if you’re
holding on tightly to old things.
It’s
like where Jesus talks about new and old wineskins. The first thing he says is that you don’t “sew
a piece of new, unshrunk cloth on old clothes; [that way,] the patch tears away
from it, the new from the old, and makes a worse tear. And no one pours new
wine into old leather wineskins; otherwise, the wine would burst the wineskins and
the wine would be lost and the wineskins destroyed. But new wine is for new
wineskins.”[3] God is ready to do a new thing in this place,
but we have to throw out the old wineskins first. There is no room for anything new, no room
for growth, no room for anyone else, if we’re holding on to those old
wineskins. We have to let them go. We have to clean up to get ready to receive
new guests.
Second,
we have to apologize and forgive. This is where John the Baptist’s message
comes in today. John the Baptist called
for people to repent, to turn away from their sins, and “to be baptized to show
that they were changing their hearts and lives and wanted God to forgive their
sins.”[4] Moving on and cleaning up doesn’t mean
ignoring what happened. Cleaning up a
mess often involves an apology and forgiveness.
Forgiving someone who wronged you, so that you can move on. Forgiving yourself for something you did, or
didn’t do and should have done.
Apologizing to those to whom you did not treat with love and grace. This is repentance: changed hearts and
lives. We’ve all done and said things we
shouldn’t have done and we can all remember someone whose words have hurt
us. Beloved, it’s time to let it
go. If you need to apologize to someone,
it’s time to do that. If you need to
forgive someone, it’s time to do that.
It’s time to let go of resentment and hurt and instead of a cold
shoulder, to offer forgiveness. It’s
hard, I know. It’s much easier to nurse
our feelings of bitterness than to have to talk with someone we don’t want to
talk with and do the hard work of forgiveness and creating a healthy
relationship. Changed hearts and
lives. It’s the only way anything is
ever going to change and it’s the only way to make way for new growth.
Finally,
the last piece of advice for a teenager of any age is to keep it clean. This requires
a change, because obviously what we did before caused the mess, so we can’t do
what we did before. A different
translation of our psalm this morning says, “Don’t let them return to foolish
ways.”[5] Foolishness is how we got into the mess we
had to clean up. Foolishness is what got
us into trouble. Foolishness is what
caused us to have to be pruned, to be sent into exile, to be punished for our
sins, to get us ready to try again.
Another version of the psalm says, “I am listening to what the Lord God
is saying; he promises peace to us, his own people, if we do not go back to our
foolish ways.”[6] Sin is how we got to the state we’re in –
conflict, argument, driving people away, division, not offering love and grace
to one another, but the penalty has been paid.
The pruning has been done. It is
time for new growth. But we can’t return
to how things were before, regardless of whether you think they were “the good
old days” or not. Now is not then. Now calls for something different, a
different behavior, a different way of being in the world, changed hearts and
lives. Our Epistle lesson from 2 Peter
says that we must live holy and godly lives, dedicated to God. It’s time to move forward. It’s time to keep it clean. That means more communication, it means less criticism
and murmuring, it means more working together.
We’re all on the same side.
Have
we learned anything as a result of our pruning?
Have we learned anything as a result of our suffering in exile? Are we ready to return to a life of
faithfulness and obedience? Are we ready
to love one another as Christ loves us? It
will mean some hard conversations as we clean up. It will mean discerning what the next step is
that God has for us as a church. We have
been pruned. We’ve been mourning in
lonely exile. It is time to extend the
hand of forgiveness and reconciliation.
It’s time to apologize for our part in creating the mess. And it’s time to come home. God is always waiting, with open arms,
watching for us to turn around from the middle of our messes and come to
him. He’s waiting for us to make room
for him in our hearts, to clear out the grudges and resentments, to clear his
way in the desert, to clear his way in White Marsh [Middle River], to clear his
way so that others can see him as well.
“Comfort,
comfort my people! Speak compassionately
to her, and proclaim to her that her penalty has been paid.” Exile is over. The time of pruning is over. It’s time for new growth. Are you ready for it?
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